A NATION CHALLENGED: THE HIJACKERS

A NATION CHALLENGED: THE HIJACKERS; Money Trail To bin Laden Is Focus Of Germans

By JOHN TAGLIABUE

Published: September 26, 2001

HAMBURG, Germany, Sept. 25—
German police are investigating financial ties between two hijackers who rammed airplanes into the World Trade Center towers and a Syrian businessman here who controls a Hamburg bank account belonging to a founder of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist network.

If the links were proved, they would appear to provide strong evidence of Al Qaeda's involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks on the trade center and the Pentagon.

A German law enforcement official said the Syrian businessman met with one of the hijackers, Marwan al-Shehhi, on several occasions. Another investigator said his agents were looking at whether the businessman was a financial source for the Sept. 11 operation.

Since the attacks in New York and Washington, it has become clear that a small technical university on the southern edge of this port city harbored a cell of Islamic fundamentalists, a group that included at least three of the hijackers who perished in the attacks. Last week, German prosecutors issued arrest warrants for two other men from Hamburg they say were involved.

Among the 27 names on a list attached to the order yesterday by President Bush to freeze suspected terrorist assets appears that of Mamoun Darkazanli, the Syrian businessman that German investigators say had close contacts with Mr. Shehhi, 23, who was on the second plane to ram the trade center.

Mr. Darkazanli's name also appears on bank documents showing he had power of attorney over an account at a Hamburg bank belonging to Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, one of the founders of Al Qaeda who is being held in New York pending trial for his involvement in the bombing of American embassies in Africa.

Last week, the German police briefly detained and questioned Mr. Darkazanli, but a spokesman for the chief German prosecutor, Kay Nehm, said no arrest warrant had been issued or other action taken against him. His whereabouts are unknown.

Mr. Salim, 43, is in custody in New York, awaiting trial both on charges that he participated in Mr. bin Laden's global terrorism conspiracy and that he stabbed and critically wounded a guard last Nov. 1 at the federal prison in lower Manhattan.

Mr. Salim, who has pleaded not guilty to all charges, was not a defendant in the embassy bombings trial, but his name surfaced repeatedly as he was portrayed as one of Mr. bin Laden's closest advisors.

Prosecutors said he helped manage Mr. bin Laden's finances, assisted in a $1.5 million deal to buy uranium for a nuclear weapon (it was not clear whether the deal ever went through), and lectured Mr. bin Laden's recruits on Islamic justification for attacks in which innocents would die.

The trio of men who died in the terrorist attacks included Mr. Shehhi, Mohamed Atta, who was said to be the head of the Hamburg cell and was on American Airlines Flight 11, and Ziad Jarrahi, a Lebanese who died on American Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania.